Monday, June 29, 2009

GardenStructure.com has another Deck Refinishing Specialist Contractor in our group of pros!

We are happy to have Martin Mihaljevic involved due to his long track record and list of happy customers.

He works directly for homeowners and can be booked through any of our existing builders in the Toronto Area or contacted directly at (416) 951-9998. Dan is also available for speaking engagements regarding the subject of exterior stain in the Toronto area.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

This project has magnified the issue for us. As you can see this builder pushed the decking tight.

Last year was the wettest year in many decades in the area it was built. The deck faces east in townhomes and has homes to the southwest on the other side so the placement is sort of cave like.

This yard gets very little sun at the best of times so mold runs rampant.
For these reasons mold has formed all over the surface of this deck.

As you can see the mold is running up the wall (though it is winter killed here it was a pretty colour of green). When decking does not dry out it can actually absorb moisture and become wetter and tighter than when it was installed.

When decking is wet you cannot apply a coating and have it stick. If anyone attempted to stain this deck the finish would be peeling within months. If the pores are full of moisture--they cannot accept the finish into them.

I hear all the arguments--the wood is wet, it will shrink and then the spaces will be too big! Nothing looks more professinal than a uniformly spaced deck. Seeing a deck with no spaces tells me that the deck builder is an amateur.

This is a nearly 400 square foot deck with tight decking and tight skirting with no space below (floating grade beam footings). If the decking was spaced and the skirting were spaced this deck would not have had mold issues.

So if mold growing up the customer's snow shovel and furniture is your idea of a quality build--Enjoy your tight decking and prosperous future .

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Which Deck Builders have Traffic... and which Deck Builders are Faking it?

When you have it... flaunt it. When you don't, Fake it! Compete.com gathers information from a number of sources and even if the actual numbers aren't perfectly accurate - for comparative purposes they are quite good.

Hickory Dickory Decks seems to be faking it. Hits are quoted to people that don't know better in order to sell advertising in the side bar of their site. They are actually auto-generating hits with rotating ads. You can leave the page running in the background of your computer and leave for 2 hours--and give them a thousand or so "Hits". They pay an SEO company to increase their web traffic--but as the search engines get smarter, even that doesn't work very well. Compete is showing them with 2000 visitors or less a month. Decks.ca has so little traffic that they have to guess, so they show that as a flat line with maybe a couple of hundred visits a month.

In general, companies that don't actually have much traffic will quote hits. Hits tell you so little that Google Analytics won't even offer that up as a statistic. Visitors, Page Views and Unique Visitors are all that matters.
____________________________________Here's how it works.

Hits - Are Requests for a file or information. It could be a block of text, a picture, an ad.

Page Views - Are requests for an individual page. It could be a refresh (F5), or someone returning to the same page.

Visits - Is a person visiting a site. It could be a second visit, third, 10th, or hundredth visit by only 1 person.

Absolutely Unique Visits - Is how many individual users visit a site in a given period of time.

We have 350% more traffic than Compete.com thinks. (Actual Statistics for Traffic Above).
Our New Website was being debugged in April so that caused errors limiting our traffic for most of the month of april... however our actual traffic is stable at 125,000 visits per month.
Google is still digging through the new content so we actually expect traffic to improve later this year as things are indexed to reflect changes. We also have thousands of photos and projects to add to the site so stay tuned!
L

Monday, June 01, 2009

Hot Tub Surround and Deck Designed and Installed by Mark Schwarz of EarthScape, Our Builder in Kitchener Waterloo

There are still hot areas available for builders in the GardenStructure.com Group

Kingston, Niagara, British Columbia, South Carolina and most of California are still available. It is still early in the Deck and Pergola Building Season so get in touch if you want to bring your game up! There are hundreds of fantastic locations for builders to start up building our decks, fences and pergolas across North America.

This year we have started offering rural licenses as well--lower population means much more affordability.

We are in need of a post hole auguring company in Hamilton and Mississauga.

We have New Builders in Hamilton, Markham, Los Angeles, Kitchener Waterloo and Brampton.

We'll be coming to Owen Sound - Collingwood Ontario soon.

We now have a full service Deck Refinishing Company in the Toronto Area.

Dave Macilius in Hamilton and Mark Schwarz in Kitchener Waterloo are both Landscape Designers and full service landscape companies as well!

Most of our builders are booking work in July, August... which is very positive since this is a challenging economy and many of our competitors have seen their web traffic drop significantly of recent in many competetive areas. Some Deck Companies are seeing 75% decrease. Our traffic is quite stable at roughly 125,000 Unique Visitors a month...

Get in touch soon regarding getting started as a deck or pergola builder within the GardenStructure.com group of companies.